One of the many reasons parenting is an impossible job is that everyone is giving you advice, and much of it is rubbish.

Frankly, it's amazing we've all made it this far.

So, bucking the trend of random anecdote and superstition, here are ten recent psychology studies that every parent should know.

1. Parents are happier than non-parents

In recent years some studies have suggested that the pleasures of having children are outweighed by the pains.

"Ha!" said parents to themselves, secretly, "I knew it!"

Not so fast though: new research has found that, on average, parents feel better than non-parents each day and derive more pleasure from caring for their children than from other activities (Nelson et al.,. 2013).

Fathers, in particular, derive high levels of positive emotions and happiness from their children.

A woman goes into labor, and gives birth. The newborn is swaddled and placed to sleep in a nearby bassinet, or taken to the hospital nursery so that the mother can rest. Despite this common practice, new research published in Biological Psychiatry provides new evidence that separating infants from their mothers is stressful to the baby.

It is standard practice in a hospital setting, particularly among Western cultures, to separate mothers and their newborns. Separation is also common for babies under medical distress or premature babies, who may be placed in an incubator. In addition, the American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends against co-sleeping with an infant, due to its association with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.

Humans are the only mammals who practice such maternal-neonate separation, but its physiological impact on the baby has been unknown until now. Researchers measured heart rate variability in 2-day-old sleeping babies for one hour each during skin-to-skin contact with mother and alone in a cot next to mother's bed. Neonatal autonomic activity was 176% higher and quiet sleep 86% lower during maternal separation compared to skin-to-skin contact.

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented on the study's findings: "This paper highlights the profound impact of maternal separation on the infant. We knew that this was stressful, but the current study suggests that this is major physiologic stressor for the infant."

This research addresses a strange contradiction: In animal research, separation from mother is a common way of creating stress in order to study its damaging effects on the developing newborn brain. At the same time, separation of human newborns is common practice, particularly when specialized medical care is required (e.g. incubator care). "Skin-to-skin contact with mother removes this contradiction, and our results are a first step towards understanding exactly why babies do better when nursed in skin-to-skin contact with mother, compared to incubator care," explained study author Dr. Barak Morgan.

More research is necessary to further understand the newborn response to separation, including whether it is sustained response and whether it has any long-term neurodevelopmental effects.

In intimate relationships, danger starts with domination - a desperate grab for control by a person who is out of control.

This is how middle-school nurse Kimberly Lindsey ended up dead two weeks ago, shot by her ex-husband, a doctor who cut off her head and fingers.

This is how police say Watisha Wallace died three weeks ago, shot multiple times by a husband who had threatened to blow her face off.

This is how Dominique Flood lost her life at 21 from a single shot to the neck four weeks ago. The suspect: Her 18-year-old boyfriend.

Domestic violence is the No. 1 cause of injury to women in America.

It happens to men, too, of course. But 75 to 80 percent of victims are women - and it's a problem so big that State Attorney Dave Aronberg felt compelled to issue a warning at a news conference last Sunday, after Lindsey's ex-husband, Albert Lambert, was found dead, hours before he was to be charged with her gruesome murder.

"The most dangerous time is at the end of a relationship," Aronberg said.

When a person is deemed trustworthy, we perceive that person's face to be more similar to our own, according to a new study published in Psychological Science.

A team of scientists from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway University, found that feelings of similarity towards others extend beyond social closeness and into physical characteristics, using trust as the basis in this experiment.

Researchers showed volunteers images in which varying percentages of the volunteer's face were morphed with that of one of two other people, and asked them to decide whether each photo contained more of their face or more of the others.

The volunteers then took part in bargaining games with both of the other people - one in which trust was reciprocated, and in the other in which it was betrayed. After the game, the volunteers carried out the photo morph task again and it was found that participants judged the trustworthy player to be more physically similar to them than the untrustworthy one.

• Causes include degradation, humiliation, hurtful criticism and betrayal

• In some cases people can feel unclean for months after the trauma

• Stanley Rachman's therapy aims to untangle the association between fear and the source of the fear

'Out, damned spot! out, I say!', cried Lady Macbeth after she had murdered King Duncan.

400-years later and Lady Macbeths' torment are still echoed by huge numbers of people who feel dirty even when they are physically clean.

Often this is a result of physical and emotional trauma, according to Stanley Rachman, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

According to a new study in the journal PLOS ONE, a UK neurology team has found that people going through a depressive episode had increased brain activity when they were asked to think about themselves.

The study team said their findings are significant because they open the door for more research and bridge the gap between psychological and neural processes.

To make their discovery, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of participants battling depression and a control group while they selected positive, negative and neutral adjectives to describe either themselves or the British Queen - a familiar figure chosen because of her remoteness from most people's lives.

"We found that participants who were experiencing depressed mood chose significantly fewer positive words and more negative and neutral words to describe themselves, in comparison to participants who were not depressed," said study author Peter Kinderman, a professor of psychological sciences at the University of Liverpool.

"That's not too surprising, but the brain scans also revealed significantly greater blood oxygen levels in the medial superior frontal cortex - the area associated with processing self-related information - when the depressed participants were making judgments about themselves," he added.

Excerpted from The Seeker King: A Spiritual Biography of Elvis Presley

To Elvis's frustration, no one in his life other than Larry Geller could appreciate his spiritual quest. The Memphis Mafia had no interest in any departure from the status quo. They resented Geller for ruining a good thing and stealing time and attention that used to belong to them.

They referred to him sarcastically as the Swami, Rasputin, and, because he was Jewish, Lawrence of Israel. They wouldn't hesitate to use the terms in front of Geller, but never in Elvis's hearing.

Colonel Parker saw him as a threat. The money machine he had constructed was humming along quite nicely. Why did Geller have to distract Elvis from important things - the things that kept the machine humming? Discounting that Geller's motives might be well intentioned and innocent, and no doubt subscribing to the notion that it takes one to know one, he concluded that the hair stylist was using his access to manipulate Elvis by psychological trickery.

He considered the whole "religious kick" nothing other than the result of mind control, and he summoned Elvis to his MGM office to tell him so. When Elvis wouldn't listen to reason, the Colonel persuaded the Mafia foreman, Joe Esposito, to report to him secretly on the state of Elvis's psychological health. As soon as Elvis became aware of the betrayal by one of his own, he immediately fired Esposito.

If you ask someone to show you how to tie their shoe-laces or play Jenga, they will almost certainly use their hands to do so.

Even people who have been blind from birth, and have never seen gestures, still use them while they talk.

But these gestures aren't just a way of communicating, they may also be a way of abstracting and encoding the information.

In a study investigating how gestures interact with thoughts, Beilock and Goldin-Meadow (2010) had participants trying to solve a test often used by psychologists called 'The Tower of Hanoi' task.

Essentially this involves moving some blocks from one tower onto another.

Could a new medical finding make it harder to claim something isn't torture?

© Public DomainTorture in the 16th century, dramatized.

The European Journal of Pain, which must be a tough place to work, published a study today out of Israel that found people who have been subjected to torture have different responses to pain than people who haven't - forever. Carried out by a physical therapist, two professors of social work, and a psychologist, the study argues that torture victims require medical treatment for this long-term pain response soon after torture, and that without it the body could continue to damage itself for decades. It also found that non-physical torture - POWs said they were subjected to extreme isolation, deprivation, and mock executions - may have some role in the long-term alteration of physical pain response.

The cold, calculating psychopath, the narcissist or the game-playing, manipulative Machiavellian.


According to clinical psychologist-turned-author, Oliver James, these are the three main types of people that can be found in your office.